Connecticut School Shooting

[Barnaby]

Thoughts and prayers to the victims and families of the horrific shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut today that left 20 young children and 6 adults dead.

[lynn cates]

yes

Hello Barnaby. Yes, indeed.

Cheers.
LC

[j.r-ahde]

Hello you all!

I wish them all the possible support and help too.

All the best
Jukka

[Archaic]

God bless all the victims- the dead, the wounded, their friends, family and town.

But in a larger sense, I feel that all Americans are victims. We now all live with the threat of gun violence, and I for one am sick of it. It's actually a form of terrorism when you think about it. Insidious daily terror. I read a statistic that 87 Americans die every day from gun violence. We need strict gun control laws, but the gun lobby is so strong I doubt it will happen. Guns are a big $$$ commodity in this country, and that commodity wraps itself in the flag to avoid common sense regulation. Any nut can get their hands on a gun.

I grew up in Connecticut, an hour away from Newtown. I went to elementary school there, 1st through 5th grade. It was idyllic, and never once did it occur to me that someone might attempt to hurt me, my friends, or our teachers. We never had a "lockdown" drill. Children today have to live in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. They have no security from senseless acts of violence, whether it be from foreign terrorists like Al Qaeda or from American terrorists like deranged citizens with guns in their midst.

What are we supposed to tell America's children?
In the aftermath of this school shooting it will be apparent to any bright child that their parents and communities cannot protect them. What effect will that constant fear and uncertainty have on their developing minds and emotions? Think about that. They're the adults of tomorrow. Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder the new "Normal"??

One member of the gun lobby said yesterday that the answer was to "arm the schoolteachers."
Picture a young kindergarten teacher just out of college trying to teach and encourage a classroom full of fidgety 5-yr olds with a handgun strapped to her hip... it's insane.
I'm waiting for some idiot to suggest that kindergarteners keep tiny size 6X bulletproof body armor in their cubbies.

I'm sick to death of hearing about my Second Amendment rights to "keep and bear arms." Little children are American citizens too. Don't they have the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Don't they have the right to grow up safely and in peace?

Best regards,
Archaic

[Fleetwood Mac]

Sympathies with the families.

To Archaic, I'm afraid that freedom comes with a price.

Within every group of people, there are the odd few who will abuse it.

Do you forgo your principles in lieu of the actions of a few bad apples?

As an Englishman, I would say the Americans are absolutely right to cherish their freedoms and guard them from an over-extended government; as we all know, power corrupts.

Ultimately, a free country pays the inevitable price of freedom.

Archaic, you don't know how good you have it over there. Continental Europe is beyond redemption; England is teetering on the brink; the United States actually has sound principles to which she adheres - issues which are really important to its people - such as individual rights which have all but been forgotten over here.

Those principles should not be thrown away because of the actions of a few bad apples.

[ChrisGeorge]

Sympathies with the families.

To Archaic, I'm afraid that freedom comes with a price.

Within every group of people, there are the odd few who will abuse it.

Do you forgo your principles in lieu of the actions of a few bad apples?

As an Englishman, I would say the Americans are absolutely right to cherish their freedoms and guard them from an over-extended government; as we all know, power corrupts.

Ultimately, a free country pays the inevitable price of freedom.

Archaic, you don't know how good you have it over there. Continental Europe is beyond redemption; England is teetering on the brink; the United States actually has sound principles to which she adheres - issues which are really important to its people - such as individual rights which have all but been forgotten over here.

Those principles should not be thrown away because of the actions of a few bad apples.

Hi Fleetwood Mac

Yes freedom comes with a price but both the United Kingdom and Canada are democracies with freedoms similar to the United States but they don't have this level of violence -- lives young and old robbed of the chance of living a long and decent life. So the question is something other than the price of freedom, isn't it? Maybe it's too late to do anything about the problems of violence in the United States but I would hope it is not too late.

Best regards

Chris

[Limehouse]

God bless all the victims- the dead, the wounded, their friends, family and town.

But in a larger sense, I feel that all Americans are victims. We now all live with the threat of gun violence, and I for one am sick of it. It's actually a form of terrorism when you think about it. Insidious daily terror. I read a statistic that 87 Americans die every day from gun violence. We need strict gun control laws, but the gun lobby is so strong I doubt it will happen. Guns are a big $$$ commodity in this country, and that commodity wraps itself in the flag to avoid common sense regulation. Any nut can get their hands on a gun.

I grew up in Connecticut, an hour away from Newtown. I went to elementary school there, 1st through 5th grade. It was idyllic, and never once did it occur to me that someone might attempt to hurt me, my friends, or our teachers. We never had a "lockdown" drill. Children today have to live in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. They have no security from senseless acts of violence, whether it be from foreign terrorists like Al Qaeda or from American terrorists like deranged citizens with guns in their midst.

What are we supposed to tell America's children?
In the aftermath of this school shooting it will be apparent to any bright child that their parents and communities cannot protect them. What effect will that constant fear and uncertainty have on their developing minds and emotions? Think about that. They're the adults of tomorrow. Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder the new "Normal"??

One member of the gun lobby said yesterday that the answer was to "arm the schoolteachers."
Picture a young kindergarten teacher just out of college trying to teach and encourage a classroom full of fidgety 5-yr olds with a handgun strapped to her hip... it's insane.
I'm waiting for some idiot to suggest that kindergarteners keep tiny size 6X bulletproof body armor in their cubbies.

I'm sick to death of hearing about my Second Amendment rights to "keep and bear arms." Little children are American citizens too. Don't they have the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Don't they have the right to grow up safely and in peace?

Best regards,
Archaic

An excellent post, right from the heart.

[Limehouse]

Sympathies with the families.

To Archaic, I'm afraid that freedom comes with a price.

Within every group of people, there are the odd few who will abuse it.

Do you forgo your principles in lieu of the actions of a few bad apples?

As an Englishman, I would say the Americans are absolutely right to cherish their freedoms and guard them from an over-extended government; as we all know, power corrupts.

Ultimately, a free country pays the inevitable price of freedom.

Archaic, you don't know how good you have it over there. Continental Europe is beyond redemption; England is teetering on the brink; the United States actually has sound principles to which she adheres - issues which are really important to its people - such as individual rights which have all but been forgotten over here.

Those principles should not be thrown away because of the actions of a few bad apples.

What a high price this town played for those 'freedoms'.

[Fleetwood Mac]

Hi Fleetwood Mac

Yes freedom comes with a price but both the United Kingdom and Canada are democracies with freedoms similar to the United States but they don't have this level of violence -- lives young and old robbed of the chance of living a long and decent life. So the question is something other than the price of freedom, isn't it? Maybe it's too late to do anything about the problems of violence in the United States but I would hope it is not too late.

Best regards

Chris

Hello Chris,

England may be a democratic country, but we have more laws governing what we can say and do than you do. I personally do not underestimate self-determination.

Individual rights and democracy are not one and the same.

The United States system of government was founded on the need to balance individual freedom with a nation able to defend itself. The system has been extremely successful for the United States and the individual remains a concern for the US way of doing things in a way it does not in England, and even less so in Europe.

It is a sad loss of life, but every system comes complete with vulnerability. The American system is a better option than the alternatives. Not perfect, but its heart is in the right place for those who value individual rights.

[Robert]

A ghastly tragedy. This person killed his own mother and then went out to kill more people, knowing that he himself would lose his life in the process. I am not sure how one is supposed to stop something like that happening. Not having access to a gun might have given him a cooling down period while he searched for some other weapon - assuming that it was a sudden fit of rage. But if it was totally premeditated, he'd have found a way anyhow.

[Bridewell]

Extending the right to 'keep and bear arms' to the psychotic and the deranged is a triumph of stubborn idiocy over common sense.

Regards, Bridewell.

[jason_c]

Sympathies with the families.

To Archaic, I'm afraid that freedom comes with a price.

Within every group of people, there are the odd few who will abuse it.

Do you forgo your principles in lieu of the actions of a few bad apples?

As an Englishman, I would say the Americans are absolutely right to cherish their freedoms and guard them from an over-extended government; as we all know, power corrupts.

Ultimately, a free country pays the inevitable price of freedom.

Archaic, you don't know how good you have it over there. Continental Europe is beyond redemption; England is teetering on the brink; the United States actually has sound principles to which she adheres - issues which are really important to its people - such as individual rights which have all but been forgotten over here.

Those principles should not be thrown away because of the actions of a few bad apples.

I have sympathy with this. These incidents are occurring more frequently, one of the reasons for this im sure is the intense publicity following such events. A pathetic loser can in an instant become a person of infamy with a few shots of a gun. Im a certain as I can be that if a media blackout followed such events then there would be less copycat incidents. Yet not for one second would the media oblige us with such a news blackout. The rights of the media come before the rights of potential victims. Well, lawful gun owners feel exactly the same way about the 2nd amendment.

[Hunter]

I don't usually post on pub talk threads and rarely indulge in political discussions here, but I'll break my own rule on this occasion to post a reply I made on another forum about this event:

It is natural to feel the need to do something - anything - to quell what appears to be an epidemic of these senseless mass murders. The unsettling truth is that there is often chaos in what we think is a civilized and structured society. For whatever reason, our culture has evolved to the point where life is not sacred and precious to a growing number of people. I'm old enough now to be aware of the 'cultural' changes that have taken place in my lifetime... and they all haven't been good. I live in a town that used to be considered like "Mayberry" and yet, we just had a gang rob a major supermarket just down the road while the store was packed with customers.

I don't know what the answer is. Personally, I think it is too late. I'm wearing a gun now, even when I'm at work. It has kept me from being killed or seriously injured on 3 occasions in the past 15 years. My wife had to use her gun to stop an intruder who entered our house while she was alone. Fortunately... so far... only presenting the gun to the offender was enough to thwart the problem. But I still chewed her out for hesitating to shoot. The next time the perp might not be so conscious about his own mortality.I just thank God that she had that gun when she needed it or I might be a widower.

What are law abiding citizens doing to help? They're doing the logical thing; they're circling the wagons to do the best to protect the ones they love. They are forming neighborhood watches. They're being more careful about their children and the influences over them. And yes, they're buying guns are are being trained to use them and be as safe as they can while exercising their inalienable right to life and liberty... And they're Goddamned worried about what their country appears to have become.

What drives all of this home to us is where this most recent tragedy happened. Norman Rockwell would have been at home there. But it happened nonetheless. Someone from a community that hadn't experienced a violent crime in 2 years or more decided to do this.

We can debate guns all we want. I'll be willing to join that debate. But I think some soul searching about our so-called 'progressive' course we have been on for decades now is in order too, and why there has been a breakdown in our moral structure; the sense of personal responsibility; shame... and consciousness of how precious innocent life is.

We've become a society of the quick fix; instant gratification; short attention span, and put things off for somebody else to deal with. What tears my guts up is that these children... and my own grandchildren for that matter, had no say in the world that they have to deal with now thanks to the seeds that have been sown before they were even born.

Just look at the common age of many of these killers and then tell me that there is not some generational dysfunction going on that is not the product of societal changes in the past several decades.

They closed up most of the asylums in the 1980's and turned the 'special needs' children loose into the general school population without any idea of monitoring what was happening to them. Kids are being raised without a strong father in their lives or not being raised at all... just put a monitor in front of them and a remote in their hands. Never mind if you take the time to even read a book to them... we'll debate whether Huckleberry Finn is even appropriate for them instead. Families don't even sit together at the supper table anymore to discuss their day. With the priorities we have focused on in the past 3 generations, its no wonder we're seeing the results.

Yep, blame guns if you will.. if that helps you better sleep at night. Then look your kids or grandchildren straight in the eye and honestly tell them that you helped build this world they have to live in (or maybe die in - by no choice of their own), and you're proud of what has collectively been accomplished by the 'progress' we have achieved. Or that you've decided that, instead of striving for individual responsibility for adults to live by, you've decided to curtail the rights of all because we now must shape society - for the 'common good' of all - based on the actions of the lowest common denominators amongst us.

Then you can, not only throw the second amendment out, but discard the whole Bill of Rights as not being worthy for America to engender anymore - if this is truly what America has become.

I love this country with all my heart and soul. Many in my family have died for it over the generations... But I am deeply worried. And despite what some may think, I despise the fact that I must carry a gun to protect myself from what has been unleashed upon us. It used to not be that way.

And if someone - or government - decides that I don't have that right anymore, and they want to compel me to abide by it, they had better bring guns themselves.
__________________

[Limehouse]

Thank you Hunter. A very heartfelt and thought-provoking post.

Personally, I don't think a change in the gun laws would have prevented this particular event. In the UK, we had a similar incident, in Dublane, Scotland, and we have very strict gun laws here. if someone is determined, they will find a way.

However, I can understand the concerns of people who are horrified by suggestions that schoolteachers should be armed so that they can react to incidents such as these.

Like you, I sometimes look around me and wonder what sort of society we have created. To me, it seems the problem is rampant consumerism.

God Bless you Hunter

[Stephen Thomas]

Personally, I don't think a change in the gun laws would have prevented this particular event.

Do you keep a semi automatic gun under your pillow, Limehouse?